_ Just for a moment:
What a strange feeling to achieve instant jury unanimity,  to have the very same conviction at the very same moment. When Christian Narkeiwicz-Laine, director of the Chicago Athenaeum, Museum and Kieran Conlon, Director of the European Center of Architecture offered us the chance to organize the Jury charged with awarding the best 40 emerging European architects under 40 years in Madrid, the award that we had received ourselves in 2008, we directly proposed to take advantage of  COAM’s organization, with its inherent stamp of quality and the volatile mix they could provide for a jury composed of very different profiles that were unusually consistent and complementary in this task.
Jose Manuel Davila (acting as representative of the COAM´s Dean Paloma Sobrini), Ignacio Vicens (Vicens & Ramos Architects), Stéphane Cottrell & Jérome Michelangeli (IAD, International Architecture Development), Ignacio Fernandez (ARUP Spain), Rafael de La-Hoz (R La-Hoz Arquitectos), Alberto Veiga (Barrozzi-Veiga Architects) all formed a compact, committed and  demanding  jury that chose 40 winners from among the 400 candidates in a second round punctuated with strong comments and fair comparisons. The quality of the projects presented drew our attention not only for their ambition but for the fidelity of the finished building to the original project, usually the domain of more experienced architects. Also worthy of note was the precise relevance of the works presented by the industrial designers who were considered for the same prize in their category.
The task was completed but not without some debate – one that transformed into a long, late lunch where spirits got lifted, where questions and laws of architecture were outlined throughout the spontaneous chat, where the presences of Sobrini Paloma (COAM ), Paloma Gomez (OCAM) and Fuensanta Nieto (Nieto-Sobejano Architects) were missing to balance the table, which was extremely lively yet perhaps too masculine.